People who are proficient with JavaScript or web technologies may not be completely comfortable with programming MCU in assembler and/or C programming language. Node.js, written in JavaScript, seems to be quite popular this days for diverse projects, but technical.io has decided to design a board called Tessel, powered by a Cortex M3 MCU. that can be fully programmed with JavaScript/Node.js.

The company is looking for funds for mass production on Dragon Innovation, a new crowdfunding platform, and has already received over $100,000 in pledges. $99 will get your the Tessel board and a Class A modules, whereas $124 is good for the Tessel board and a Class B module. Shipping is expected for February 2014. You can find further information and/or pledge on their campaign page.

There is another board with some similarities, albeit lower-spec (on the other hand, it is also much lower-priced) on Kickstarter now.
It is also programmable in Javascript, also runs on an Arm Cortex-M3. Memory is lower (256KB Flash, 48KB RAM), as is clock speed (72 MHz). It doesn’t have Wi-Fi. Price is GBP 19 for one board, or GBP38 for 2 boards+2 NRF24L01+ wireless tranceivers. The board is called Espruino (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/48651611/espruino-javascript-for-things).

We’re currently running a custom-built, real time operating system on top of a Lua Runtime. Your JavaScript is compiled to Lua bytecode when you push your code, and that bytecode is run on the runtime. It’s this runtime that allows us to have such low memory overhead. We may switch over to an implementation of Libuv or a microLinux flavor in the future, but that shouldn’t change anything about the user experience with Tessel (except it will be faster!)”